licentious radio

Thursday, June 20, 2002
[11:36:46 AM]

"If Bush has a factual case against Iraq concerning weapons of mass destruction, he hasn't made it yet." [latimes.com]. Summary: The leaks about the CIA hitting Iraq are to make sure Iraq doesn't allow weapons inspectors. Bush's goons are doing everything they can to prevent weapons inspections in Iraq, because inspections are an alternative to invasion, and would raise questions about the need for invasion.

[11:27:04 AM]

My collection of jokes and faux press releases is at the link called Stories. The September 11 comment is serious, but the rest are (intended to be) funny. What did Mae West say to the energy executives? Bill Clinton and Little George's Teachers encouraged them. Don't miss: Rumsfeld keeps straight face.

[11:05:48 AM]

"Anyone who is not talking about closing settlements is not talking about peace." [commondreams.org].

[10:32:17 AM]

Without a terrorism warning in the last couple of days, I was beginning to feel rather unsettled. Fortunately, this morning I read the latest warning for which they have no specific evidence. It's a great relief to me.

[10:23:40 AM]

I was excited to try out Macintosh OS X's new text rendering (in 10.1.5). BAD MOVE. Don't do it! Apple screws us again.

zeldman [zeldman.com]: "In these applications, font smoothing is on at all sizes, regardless of user preferences. Smoothing throws off spacing, adversely affecting web layouts. Quartz font metrics mess up the rendering of Type 1 fonts. There are additional problems and trade-offs--enough to fill a book--but these are the highlights."

I (pathetically) hoped that the the new rendering would improve readability. I noticed that Mozilla supports the CSS2 feature that lets a stylesheet adjust the letterspacing. I wanted to add a little space between letters, and subtract a little space between words. Unfortunately, the Quartz rendering is too horrible for words. And now there's no (reasonable) way to go back.

Spare yourselves.

[By the way, the space hacking is plausible because I set the 19-inch monitor for 1600x1200, shrank the display size to the minimum, set the pixels per inch in Mozilla to 120, and used *points* for sizing. This combination lets text that is 1/6-inch high on the monitor (12 points) have 20+ pixels vertically. This starts to be enough pixels to render text well, but alas the rendering is wretched because of Apple's upgrade.]

[9:41:03 AM]
Wow. "But (seeking permission [to link]) is a matter of respect and honor for what we're trying to do here." Wrong. Linking is a matter of respect and honor. Demanding permission is disrespect, dishonor, and an assault on the value of the internet.